Employment: From Social Policy to Employment Policy – Lessons for Social Partners
Chair: Juliet Webster, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
2.1 Issues for the Social Dialogue
Joachim Ott, European Commission, DG Employment
This presentation contained information about the policy issues and activities in the social partner’s dialogue. In the private service sectors there are already 27 active sector dialogue committees. These committees deal with issues in six thematic areas:
- Quality of work
- Employment
- Health and Safety
- Rights at work
- Lifelong Learning
- Employment Policy in Central Eastern European Countries
The Eastern-European enlargement adds new issues to the social dialogue because the employment relations in the MEO-countries are far from the standards set in the EU-15 countries. The question is how the EU-model of industrial relations will function in spite of its diversity.
Joachim Ott also informed the participants about the process of the European Employment Policy. Every year in the late fall, employment guidelines are formulated. The current guidelines highlight the issues of employability, adaptability of firms and employees, and equal opportunities. These topics are then broken down into national action plans by the national governments during
the following months. At the end of the process, in summer every year, the national strategies are adopted on the EU-level. Joachim Ott pointed out some current topics of the Social Dialogue: Under the heading of adaptability, flexibility is the major issue of modernisation. Flexibility is regarded as good and useful to employers as well as to employees but it must be held in balance with security.
Actual research results show remarkable national differences concerning the penetration of flexibility into employment relations. For example, in Italy two thirds of all new contracts are “flexible” in one or more aspects, while in France, the government is trying to reduce flexible working.
The issue of the gender gap in pay is has recently been defined as a social partners’ issue by the commission.
In the discussion following the presentation Juliet Webster first asked how the social partners dealt with the tension between employees’ and employers’ need for determining flexibility in accordance with their partly conflicting interests.
Secondly, she asked how the problem of unequal pay is dealt with in the Social Dialogue.
In answer to this, Joachim Ott stated that both topics, flexibility and the gender pay gap, were regarded as minor issues within general wage bargaining. However, gender equality plans have been passed in the postal and commerce sectors.
There may be some ongoing debates in other sectors, but the Social Partners see them as national issues.
Jo Morris argued that while the problems of unequal pay cannot be resolved through the Social Dialogue, the European level seems to be the appropriate arena for guidelines for the battle against sexual harassment. This has been regulated quite strongly by the European Commission. In spite of this, the Commission does not seem to be aware of how intense the influence of the unequal pay problem is on other political issues, such as on social policy. If the Commission regarded the gender gap in pay as a serious issue, a European directive would be passed that would force the national governments to incorporate equal pay into their national law.
Ronan O’Brian asked about forthcoming guidelines for the improvement of work
quality. His question was answered by Joachim Ott who said that in spring 2002 the employment guidelines which were currently being discussed would cover propositions for quality of work in eight policy areas. This will be based on the national action reports which show what has been done so far. Patricia Vandramin added that a report of the Dublin Foundation on the quality of work in Europe would be presented in December 2001.
2.2 Flexibility – company activity, worker passivity?
Steffen Lehndorff, IAT, Germany
The second speaker reported on two general trends in service employment: The marketization and the polarisation of qualifications. Marketization means that the principles of the market are increasingly being integrated into the firms’ policy. The firms then expect the employees to behave as quasi-entrepreneurs. For example, in health care work, the employees must be aware of the competitors’ offers.
Polarisation means that both low- and high-qualified jobs are becoming increasingly important on the labour market. As a result of this, divergent trends are observable – some service work is becoming polarised while other service work is increasingly subjected to forms of self organisation.
The political conclusion that is to be drawn from this is that flexibility cannot be available to employers for free. In the case of passive flexibility, where firms require time flexibility and low-skilled work, and in the case of active flexibility with highly qualified and self organised work, “win-win-situations” should be made possible.
Heike Jacobsen questioned this conclusion by asking whether there were any examples of solutions that have met the needs of firms as well as the needs of the employees. What are the indicators for real “win-win-situations” and how are they regulated?
In his answer, Steffen Lehndorff pointed out that observations over a longer period of time would be necessary to find the traces of “win-win-situations”, because there was some evidence that organisations’ innovations such as “working time
on trust” start with improvements for the employees but tend to increase labour intensity in the long run.
Possible regulations of the labour market as well as the product market were addressed. Concerning the labour market, it would be an appropriate measure to constrain the working hours to a maximal level. The French experience with the 35 hours week shows that such a strategy can be successful. In this case, the shortening of the individual working hours for one part of the labour force opens opportunities for the extending of individual working hours for others.
Another approach is via the product market. Examples from the health care services in the Netherlands and the UK show that there is a tendency towards compulsory competitive standards and accordingly higher qualification levels.
Ronan O’Brien summarised his impression of the presentations and the discussion by stating that the picture was rather depressing. There seems to be an overall tendency to increase the intensity of work, even when “self-organised”.
He posed the question as to what influence the actual economic cycle has on the intensity of work.
2.3 Women’s flexible employment – what they have and what they need Louise Thomassen, Dansk Technological Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark In this presentation, some findings of the SERVEMPLOI project were interpreted.
In the financial services sector the labour force is being deskilled by ICTs when knowledge is incorporated within the informational system. However, there are relevant groups of employees that must acquire more “skills”. Call centres are a new organisational form for handling low skilled numerically flexible work at peak hours. In retail trade numerical flexibility initiated by the employers has mainly been found. In Ireland, an exception because it has an economy with labour shortages, flexibility is sometimes offered to employees as a reward. In the UK, flexible working hours, in particular longer hours per day, are welcomed by mothers with dependent children as a means to reduce the costs of childcare.
In most of the countries researched, the institutional settings favour flexible
working time. The cost of flexibility is paid by individuals and families. The cost of being “available” is the employees’ risk, while the benefits are the employers’.
Louise Thomassen asked whether this was fair. Up until now the trade unions did have not seemed to care about employees with flexible contracts. They have been invisible to the trade unions and lead to the question as to whether the unions are really interested in organising these parts of the labour force or whether they are still hanging onto their role as advocates of the core labour force.
2.4 Corporate good practice: The case of Aachener und Münchener Lebensversicherung
Annas-Rockenfeller, Aachener und Münchener Lebensversicherung, Germany
This contribution was an example of the modern work organisation of a leading German insurance company. In the last years of the 1980s the company invested more than five million Euros in its technical equipment and in qualifying the already highly qualified work staff of about six hundred employees. Each employee was trained over a period of ten months for about forty percent of the individual working hours. This investment was supported by the German Federal Ministry for Research through a programme for research and development for the humanisation of work places. On the basis of the very high qualification level it was possible to organise all work functions into homogenous work groups, making every employee capable of performing every task (with some minor exceptions for special tasks). The company has been able to improve efficiency and productivity enormously and customer service has reached a remarkably higher level of quality. According to Annas-Rockenfeller, this is largely due to high employee commitment.
During the 1990s this group work organisation was carefully improved. Since mid 1995 two major changes have taken place: A quality control system was implemented that benchmarks the groups’ output and measures quality as well as productivity and the groups have begun to organise themselves on an even more
autonomous basis. This kind of work organisation seems to function very well.
Productivity has increased by about 20 percent and employee surveys show that the personnel is very content with their highly qualified work.
In the following contribution, Ms. Merlin, Ministry for Labour and social Affairs, France, talked about the French experience with the law on the 35 hour working week. She explained that before the past elections, under the former conservative government in France, as in other European countries, labour was mainly flexibilised by reducing the individual hours of part-time employees on the one side and extending the individual hours of many full-time employees on the other side. The goal of the liberal government was to reduce the individual working time of full-time employees to about 35 hours per week on average annually. A law was put into effect in January 2000 for firms with more than 20 employees. By February 2002 this law will also apply to small Firms with less than 20 employees.
In preparation for the implementation of the law, negotiations have been taking place over a period of about two years (1998-2000). In 2001, 7 Mio people out of a total labour force of 15 Mio, worked within the 35-hours-framework, and 300 thousand new jobs were created. The social partners found solutions for the realisation of the 35-hour work week by creating new jobs. Those firms that have reduced the individual working hours very fast have created the highest number of new jobs.
Today, two thirds of the employees are content or very content with their working hours. The most positive affects have occurred within the work lives of highly qualified female employees with children.